Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

Survey of Distributed Decision

We survey the recent distributed computing literature on checking whether a given distributed system configuration satisfies a given boolean predicate, i.e., whether the configuration is legal or illegal w.r.t. that predicate. We consider classical distributed computing environments, including mostly synchronous fault-free network computing (LOCAL and CONGEST models), but also asynchronous crash-prone shared-memory computing (WAIT-FREE model), and mobile computing (FSYNC model)

Weighted Modal Transition Systems

Specification theories as a tool in model-driven development processes of component-based software systems have recently attracted a considerable attention. Current specification theories are however qualitative in nature, and therefore fragile in the sense that the inevitable approximation of systems by models, combined with the fundamental unpredictability of hardware platforms, makes it difficult to transfer conclusions about the behavior, based on models, to the actual system. Hence this approach is arguably unsuited for modern software systems. We propose here the first specification theory which allows to capture quantitative aspects during the refinement and implementation process, thus leveraging the problems of the qualitative setting. Our proposed quantitative specification framework uses weighted modal transition systems as a formal model of specifications. These are labeled transition systems with the additional feature that they can model optional behavior which may or may not be implemented by the system. Satisfaction and refinement is lifted from the well-known qualitative to our quantitative setting, by introducing a notion of distances between weighted modal transition systems. We show that quantitative versions of parallel composition as well as quotient (the dual to parallel composition) inherit the properties from the Boolean setting.Comment: Submitted to Formal Methods in System Desig

A formal support to business and architectural design for service-oriented systems

Architectural Design Rewriting (ADR) is an approach for the design of software architectures developed within Sensoria by reconciling graph transformation and process calculi techniques. The key feature that makes ADR a suitable and expressive framework is the algebraic handling of structured graphs, which improves the support for specification, analysis and verification of service-oriented architectures and applications. We show how ADR is used as a formal ground for high-level modelling languages and approaches developed within Sensoria

Software components as invariant-typed arrows

Keynote talk at CBSOFT, Natal, September 2012nvariants are constraints on software components which restrict their behavior in some desirable way, but whose maintenance entails some kind of proof obligation discharge. Such constraints may act not only over the input and output domains, as in a purely functional setting, but also over the underlying state space, as in the case of reactive components. This talk introduces an approach for reasoning about invariants which is both compositional and calculational: compositional because it is based on rules which break the complexity of such proof obligations across the structures involved; calculational because such rules are de- rived thanks to an algebra of invariants encoded in the language of binary relations. A main tool of this approach is the pointfree transform of the predicate calculus, which opens the possibility of changing the underly- ing mathematical space so as to enable agile algebraic calculation. The development of a theory of invariant preservation requires a broad, but uniform view of computational processes embodied in software components able to take into account data persistence and continued interaction. Such is the plan for this talk: we first introduce such processes as arrows, and then invariants as their types.(undefined

Graphical Encoding of a Spatial Logic for the pi-Calculus

This paper extends our graph-based approach to the verification of spatial properties of π-calculus specifications. The mechanism is based on an encoding for mobile calculi where each process is mapped into a graph (with interfaces) such that the denotation is fully abstract with respect to the usual structural congruence, i.e., two processes are equivalent exactly when the corresponding encodings yield isomorphic graphs. Behavioral and structural properties of π-calculus processes expressed in a spatial logic can then be verified on the graphical encoding of a process rather than on its textual representation. In this paper we introduce a modal logic for graphs and define a translation of spatial formulae such that a process verifies a spatial formula exactly when its graphical representation verifies the translated modal graph formula

Interconnection network with a shared whiteboard: Impact of (a)synchronicity on computing power

In this work we study the computational power of graph-based models of distributed computing in which each node additionally has access to a global whiteboard. A node can read the contents of the whiteboard and, when activated, can write one message of O(log n) bits on it. When the protocol terminates, each node computes the output based on the final contents of the whiteboard. We consider several scheduling schemes for nodes, providing a strict ordering of their power in terms of the problems which can be solved with exactly one activation per node. The problems used to separate the models are related to Maximal Independent Set, detection of cycles of length 4, and BFS spanning tree constructions

Décidabilité et Complexité

International audienceL'informatique fondamentale est un vaste sujet, comme en témoignent les 2 283 et 3 176 pages des "Handbooks" (228; 1). Couvrir en quelques dizaines de pages, l'ensemble de l'in- formatique nous a semblé une entreprise hors de notre portée. De ce fait, nous nous sommes concentrés sur la notion de calcul, sujet qui reflète le goût et la passion des auteurs de ce chapitre. La notion de calcul est omniprésente et aussi ancienne que les mathématiques